


Vormarlow's Honour

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow series - Forest, Vorkosigan Saga - Bujold
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:40:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A crossover imagining what might have happened if the Marlows had been born in Lois McMaster Bujold's Nexus. Captain Lord Piotr Vormarlow, a not-very-distinguished officer in Emperor Gregor's service, is in charge of transporting Lord Ivan Vorpatril to ramshackle Vega Station for diplomatic negotiations with the Cetagandans.  All does not go to plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://frankie-ecap.livejournal.com/profile)[**frankie_ecap**](http://frankie-ecap.livejournal.com/)'s birthday present. Written with [](http://coughingbear.livejournal.com/profile)[**coughingbear**](http://coughingbear.livejournal.com/), without whom the good ship _Foxwosk_ would not have left shore, let alone reached harbour, and with many thanks to [](http://thewhiteowl.livejournal.com/profile)[**thewhiteowl**](http://thewhiteowl.livejournal.com/) for particularly patient beta-reading, particularly around the bits I wrote that had anything to do with boats.

Captain Lord Piotr Vormarlow, of Vormarlow Tsenàly on the South Continent, had never really thought of himself as a colonialist oppressor.

In the first place, the family estates were composed of approximately eighty per cent cliffs and oceanfront to twenty per cent marginally cultivable land, supposing that the marginal cultivator had a high tolerance for rooting up love-lies-itching and Vorthiessen's Crawlgrass; and in the second place, they had only descended to Piotr's side of the family through the accidental death of a cousin in a lightflyer collision during the Vordarian Pretendership. When he thought about it at all, which was not very often, Piotr was conscious of an exquisite gratitude that it had fallen to his elder brother Gennady to settle the district's accounts, find dowries for their unmarried sisters and soothe local antipathies towards the much richer lands held by Count Vormerigo on the other side of the mountains before they broke out into dynamiting of war monuments and wholesale horse-theft. He was also conscious - and this, he thought about far more often that he would like - that his gratitude was probably not shared by the Imperial bureaucracy. Gennady's career in the Emperor's service had been considerably more dashing and more distinguished than Piotr's own.

It had certainly never involved ferrying what must surely have been the Emperor's very stupidest cousin to negotiations on Vega Station. Vega Station was, in the heartfelt words of the elderly Vice-Admiral who had given Piotr his briefing, halfway between Kshatriya and nowhere. It maintained a sort of ramshackle neutrality, mostly because none of the major powers actually _wanted_ it. The habitat was in a bad state and would require considerable capital expenditure to bring it up even to Barrayaran safety standards, which had not changed appreciably since Emperor Vlad Vorbarra had scribbled _Let there be a roof, if at all possible, over the horses_ at the bottom of the draft bill presented to him by his Council of Counts; to achieve the basic minimums mandated by Beta Colony law would have cost rather more than building a new habitat of twice the size.

The wormholes Vega Station watched over were similarly underwhelming. One led to an outlying and vehemently self-contained Kshatriyan outpost, and the other to the half-mothballed habitat at Longshot. What traffic there was through the station consisted of occasional parties of academics from Earth or Beta Colony on their way to Longshot, which held the vague distinction of being the third oldest continually maintained habitat in the Nexus; occasional local shuttles from the Vega System's single habitable planet, whose overenthusiastic seas, egged on by a bizarre assortment of moons, made the coastal waters off Vormarlow Tsenàly look downright friendly; and even more occasional parties of Kshatriyan mercenaries, who used the route only when more convenient ones were unavailable.

It was, therefore, a distinct surprise to Piotr to find that what had been pointed out to him on the diagram of the station's schematics as the one docking bay with reliable electrical connections was already occupied. "What's that?" he demanded involuntarily, staring at the station and the ship, as they revolved like a pair of particularly mismatched mirror-dancers in exquisitely unwelcome holographic form above the desk in his cramped cabin.

The Emperor's cousin leaned his uniformed hip against the doorframe and looked helpful. "It's the _Superior Flame Of Eta Ceta_," he offered. "It says so, there, look, on the side."

"Thank you very much indeed, Lord Ivan," said Piotr through gritted teeth. "I can see that it's the _Superior Flame Of Eta Ceta_. What's it doing here?"

"They didn't brief _me_ to expect it," offered Lord Ivan, more helpfully still. "Not that I remember. And it certainly wasn't here last time."

"What are you even doing here - my lord?" Piotr asked, adding the honorific ungraciously.

"I was bored."

Piotr bit back _you're always bored_, as Lord Ivan would only have wanted to have an amiable discussion about it. The man was more lacking in what Piotr's sister Irina was wont to describe as _inner resources_ than anyone else Piotr knew, and Piotr's standards of _anyone_ included his sister Lavrenti, not to mention several horses. Unfortunately, when Lord Ivan got bored, he tended to go and find somebody and share the boredom around. Piotr had frequently considered manufacturing a small emergency just to deprive himself of Ivan's conversation, but his second officer, a humourless individual who Piotr suspected of being ImpSec, would only have taken the opportunity to investigate with quite unnecessary thoroughness.

His wrist com buzzed. "Mr Notaras' compliments, Captain, and we're coming into coms range," sang out a voice from the bridge.

"I'm on my way." Piotr brushed past Ivan in the doorway.

Ivan looked apologetic. "Sorry. I'm used to m'cousin. He doesn't need as much room to pass. Physically, I mean. Metaphorically, I'd advise you to give him a berth several galaxies wide. _He makes people do things,_" he added darkly.

Piotr dusted down his uniform and glared at the Emperor's cousin. He was already quite aware that despite the exercises mandated by the Fleet Ordinances for anyone travelling outside planetary gravity, his uniform was one of the larger sizes available, and could probably have fit two of Ivan's hyperactive cousin the Imperial Auditor standing side by side. As it happened, there _were_ two of Ivan's cousin, but Piotr had better things to do right now to consider the Vorkosigan family's bizarrely liberal attitude towards cloning.

His second officer fell in behind him as he hurried towards the bridge. The man's name was Notaras, and Piotr didn't like him. He wasn't sure why. He very seldom _did_ know why he liked or disliked people. In Notaras' case, it might have been because he seemed to have emerged from the Imperial Service Academy with every trace of personality ground out of him, until he presented a surface as gunmetal-glass unreadable as polished marble from the Black Escarpment. Nothing in his behaviour or mannerisms was typically Greek, but nor had he gone the other way and become more Vor than the Vor as some of the minority students at the Academy did. He was efficient and self-effacing, and he made Piotr want to punch walls almost as much as Lord Ivan, who did not have 'self-effacing' in his vocabulary, possibly because it had too many syllables.

Piotr returned Notaras' salute. "I thought I told you to keep that Vor twit out of my way," he growled, aware that he was being unfair, and somehow unable to do anything about it except be _more_ unfair, which was anyway no consolation because, when confronted with Notaras, unfairness bounced.

"I lent him a holonovel."

"I know you lent him a holonovel. I had to listen to him explaining to me over breakfast how he thought that _Mathematical Beauty_ would be a light operetta set at a university during the Time of Isolation, and how disappointed he was that it was actually a biography of a pre-Recontact Terran physicist."

"I found it very interesting," stated Notaras.

Piotr had reviewed the holonovel himself when it had newly come out and come to the conclusion that it would have been enlivened no end by more scenes on horseback and fewer equations. He gave Notaras an impatient look and strode onto the bridge. Everyone jacknifed to attention. The ensign at the coms panel looked up with an eager expression. Piotr wondered whether he had ever been that bright-eyed, or that young. He doubted it. "The Cetas are offering to move."

"_Are_ they," Piotr growled. "Mr Notaras, I'm going to want a full-spectrum sweep of that berth as soon as possible. We don't want the Cetas to leave behind any surprises. The Emperor's compliments and thanks, and you know the drill. Carry on, Mr Dashvili."

The ensign turned back to his panel. The _Superior Flame of Eta Ceta_ unhooked itself in slow-time, rotating away against the stars in that gravity-free fashion that always looked unlikely to Piotr, even after half a lifetime in which he'd spent more time shipboard than planetside. However many generations the human race had spent among the stars, the human brain still took gravity as its default.

Vega Station swung towards them, the mirror-dancer taking a new partner.

\--

Docking and quarantine procedures took much the same time at any habitat; what was gained in lack of congestion was lost through small-station slowness, or vice versa, and it _always_ involved standing about in uncomfortably cramped personnel hatch bays. Piotr straightened his uniform jacket. Behind him, Lord Ivan coughed. "I've been here before."

After a moment, Piotr realised that the remark wasn't _quite_ as idiotic as it sounded, and that Lord Ivan meant Vega Station, and not the personnel hatch bay, which smelt as if it had last been used for waste-water reclamation. "Yes, Lord Ivan," he said unencouragingly. He knew that the Emperor's cousin had been here before, though all attempts to find out _why_ had been foiled by lack of the correct security clearance. It was the only reason he could think of to account for why Lord Ivan had been sent to these negotiations at all.

Ivan coughed again. "The only decent bar's the Singapore Sling on Maindeck One," he remarked meaningfully.

Piotr looked at him. What he saw did not please him any more than it had at any point on the journey. Lord Ivan was about the same age as Piotr, but taller, broader-shouldered, darker, and much less prone to strawy baldness or solid, suety mass under the regulation belt. He reminded Piotr vaguely of a more muscular version of Count Vormerigo's heir, though his eyes were dark brown rather than the uncanny yellow which a past Count Vormerigo had had declared, by a bill put forward in front of the Council of Counts, _not_ to be a mutation. "It'll be a long time before I'll buy you a drink," he said, meaning it both in the _we have upcoming diplomatic duties_ sense and the other one.

"No." Lord Ivan got that look on his face that Piotr had begun, unwillingly, to interpret as _my cousin would have understood me by now_. "What I mean is, it'll be full of Cetas. If our men pile in there on shore leave, there'll be a riot."

Piotr reluctantly admitted that he was right, and that the Singapore Sling had better be declared off-limits for the time being. "Is there another bar?"

"Bound to be." Ivan considered. "Someone told me about a Madame Phoebe's Place. Told me that if I was going to go there I should be on my best behaviour when I went in, or I would be when I left."

"I can't go round restricting which brothels the crew go to. It's not my place," said Piotr, all of his Vor ancestors sharing self-righteously in his shock.

"She's not _that_ kind of madam," Ivan assured him. "I asked."

\--

The apartments Piotr was assigned on the station were cramped enough to tempt the suspicion that they had been designed for yet another clone of Ivan's cousin the Imperial Auditor, this one an agoraphobic. The walls were peeling, and so thin that he could hear his fleet legal officer Lieutenant Vorroux coughing in the next cabin. To add insult to injury, the water and light were metered, and the meter didn't take Barrayaran currency. Piotr adjusted the tabs on his lapels as best he could in the tiny mirror and stored his holocamera lovingly in the room's safe. The safe coughed up a disagreeable demand for a deposit of fourteen Betan dollars, payable immediately.

The official meeting with representatives of Vega Station was an almost perfect example of its kind. The only jarring factor was the presence of Cetagandan officer, a ghem-Colonel Demaro, painted up like the enamelled handle of Piotr's sister Irina's Vorfemme knife, which didn't sound all that foreboding unless one knew that Irina Vormarlow was by a long way the most formidable of a formidable family of sisters. Piotr tried not to wonder what happened if the man sweated.

The station commander, a hollow-eyed woman called Harrap, made a speech. The dock superintendent, a harrassed-looking little man of Tau Cetan ancestry by the name of Rochard, made a speech. Ivan made a speech, looking so concussed throughout the process that Piotr was absolutely convinced he was actually under the thrall of some devilish ImpSec device that had taken temporary control of his brain and his tongue. He only wished it could be made permanent.

There was, even worse, a cultural component to the meeting. An engineer with a prosthetic arm and a name that Piotr didn't catch gave an appallingly dull speech concerning installation of soletta arrays on the planet below. Lieutenant Vorroux, who came from a remote corner of the Northern Continent where the vile things were actually _popular_, played the bagpipes. Piotr had allowed this to go ahead on the cynical grounds that hearing Vorroux' cultural contribution would squelch any desire on anyone's part to make _further_ speeches, and that in any case whatever the Cetas had produced by way of entertainment a week or so earlier would undoubtedly have been even worse.

"How interesting," said Rochard weakly. "And what was the name of that beautiful composition?"

Piotr's brain jumped desperately from Rochard's Tau Ceti-dark skin to the engineer's false arm to the ballad in question, which was mostly an anodyne paean to the beauty of the Long Lake and the Dendarii Mountains but which contained two verses of quite vicious instructions concerning how to keep the aforementioned lake and mountains genetically pure. Notaras coughed. "I believe it's called _Peace Between Friends_," he murmured tactfully. "But the original title is in an obscure Georgian dialect, and I may be wrong."

Harrap looked politely pleased. Rochard and the engineer looked profoundly uninterested, and ghem-Colonel Demaro looked as blank as a man so embellished was capable. Piotr was absolutely certain that the Cetagandan knew quite well what that piece of music was called _and_ why Notaras had fudged it. Distracted, he tried to sign a form that was meant for Lord Ivan, and then ended up snubbing Lord Ivan's attempt at making a joke of it. Now the Cetas would think there were divisions between them, and it would all be his fault.

His gut heaved with the squeamish hatred of being wrong, of being put in his place, that made him brusque and blunt with his crew; any one of whom he would have died for, but who would have returned the compliment only because he was a representative of the Emperor. Much to his relief, the ceremony was ending with an exchange of a large framed picture of the Emperor and Empress and their two plump blond sons for something purporting to be a holobook of historical views of Longshot, which Piotr handed hastily off to Notaras.

Lord Ivan strolled off towards his quarters. "I'll meet you later for that drink," he said; and, feeling uncomfortably one-down and underdoggish but not wanting to give the Cetas any leverage to pry them apart, Piotr agreed.

It was not until he got to the bar that he realised the true extent of Ivan Vorpatril's perfidy. Vega Station kept to Earth-normal lights, an affectation in a habitat that Earth wouldn't deign to notice if it toppled sideways into its own wormhole. The light was an unnecessarily buttery yellow, showing up the tatty walkways and peeling corridors. As he crossed the threshold of Madame Phoebe's Place, filters turned the light warm and slightly reddish instead. Dome-light, Piotr thought. A row of breathers hugged the wall as it curved inward, and over the bar someone - with no little skill - had painted a mural of lakes and towers and bubble-car tubes.

Everyone seated at the sunken benches looked up at Piotr. None of them looked friendly. Piotr had never hoped more strongly that somewhere among the delegates from Vega Station, Longshot Station and the ocean planet whose name he couldn't remember, there lurked a really debilitating digestive virus that might strike Lord Ivan down and confine him to his cabin, preferably in agony, for the entirety of the journey back to Barrayar. Vorroux jostled him in the doorway, two men from Engineering behind him. "Captain! Let me buy you a drink. Lord Vorpatril recommended this... oh." Vorroux looked as deflated as his bagpipes. "Lord Vorpatril didn't tell me this was a _Komarran_ bar."

Piotr Vormarlow had never felt more like a colonialist oppressor.


	2. Chapter 2

Not quite the first thing Piotr remembered after entering the bar - but certainly the first thing he _cared_ to remember - was someone doing what felt like competently medical things to an injury on his arm. It hurt like hell, which at least meant he wasn't in cryosuspension. "Gently, Vorroux," he groaned.

"My name's not Vorroux," said a low and distinctly familiar female voice.

"Though if it were, I could think of no greater honour to myself and my family," said Vorroux gallantly from somewhere over Piotr's left shoulder. Piotr attempted to turn and look for him; his sense of balance, very firmly, thought differently. His head swam. He sat down again.

The person holding his arm made an annoyed noise that was almost a growl in the back of her throat. That too was familiar. "An auto-needler in my bar!" she growled, sounding like a pleasantly female and protective version of one of the clone-bears that the two-centuries-dead Mad Count Vormerigo had thought it was a good idea to introduce to the Southern Continent's ecosystem. "I hope Station Security drops him through the wormhole without shielding. Not that your man was any better, flinging himself at him like that, it was bound to go off."

"A projectile weapon in a habitat." Vorroux sounded nauseated. "Thank God it was set on pin-point and not scatter."

"Yes, or there wouldn't be enough of you _or_ your captain to gather up in a bucket and hand over to Station Security. It wouldn't have penetrated the habitat's outer hull, though, so you don't need to worry about that. They're strictly short-range. They work off compressed gas."

Vorroux gulped. "It must have been very distressing for you, ma'am. Are you sure you're quite recovered from your ordeal? Would you like me to get you a drink of - whatever that is in the decanter?"

"No serving drinks in my bar without going through the stringent interview process, lad," said the female voice. Piotr wanted to see how Vorroux took being called _lad_ and if it made any kind of dent in his gallantry, but at that point something that hurt like all his nerves igniting at once was tweezed out of his arm, and he fainted again.

When he came round, Vorroux and the female voice were arguing about whether to call Station Security or Station Medical or both. "I've got nothing to hide," said the female voice, which sounded to Piotr, in his light-headed state, as if it was altogether made of secrets. Secrets and smoke. Smoky secrets. Smoke and secrets and _why was he thinking about brown eyes and thick brown hair and a downright expression and the smell of the air back at Vormarlow Tsenàly?_ "Station Security will probably _try_ to slap a fine on me because the incident happened in my bar..."

Piotr's memories, though muddled, were of something rather more alarming than an _incident_. He couldn't remember what had happened first - whether one of the engineers had nudged Vorroux and muttered something insulting about Komarrans _before_ the tall Komarran fellow got to his feet with the auto-needler glinting in his hand. Certainly, both of those things had happened before the _other_ Komarran, the grey-haired one who looked old enough to have been in the Revolt, and tough enough too, had grabbed his fellow's hand and jerked it upward and back. Then the statuesque woman behind the bar had dived for cover and slapped a button that shielded the bar in something that looked as if it had started life as a blast door, and the other engineer - Tcheky, was that his name? had barreled into the fray shouting something that even Piotr's fuzzy memory rendered as disastrously close to _Just like a Komarran, shoot at a woman, would you?_ After that it was all... incidental.

"... but believe me, if I can't talk Station Security out of the fine I can _certainly_ make sure the Komarran community recompense me. Even if it means they can't afford to drink here again for six months, better that than barred permanently." The female voice put a distinct bite into _permanently_. "The point I am attempting to make to you, Mr Vorroux, is that the station medical facilities are for sale to the highest bidder, like everything else on Vega Station that isn't soldered down, and if you have any concerns whatever about the friendliness of the Cetagandan legation, I would advise you to sling your captain's _good_ arm around your neck and haul him back to the medical bay of the _Prince Dorca_ by any means necessary."

It sounded a bit like Irina's turn of phrase, particularly towards the end; but Irina's voice was lighter, and grew positively dry when discussing anything that might possibly have an emotional import. Whereas this woman actually sounded concerned about Piotr's safety. He could tell from the way the laughter he had thought was an integral component of that gorgeous voice dropped completely away when she mentioned the medical facility and the Cetagandans.

Vorroux gulped. "I'll have to ask Second Officer Notaras..."

"The one Piotr was shouting about not having anything to do with?" Her voice was amused, decisive. Like warm honey. Honey and smoke. Honey and plums and smoke and the air back at Vormarlow Tsenàly, up on the cliffs before dawn... "Good idea. I trust this Notaras already."

Piotr reached out with his good hand and managed to snare her wrist. He could already see Notaras' report in only too dreadful detail. Here he was, very nearly a twenty years' man, and to have his career end in a dishonourable discharge after a _fight in a Komarran bar_... The consequences spilt out in front of him, like the sea emerging from mist. Gennady unable to attract settlers to farm the reclaimed land in the north. Irina and Lavrenti and Nicola, their marital prospects ruined by scandal, not that he was sure who'd marry either of the twins after they'd been gadding about amongst galactics for all this time, but he'd like them to have the option. Virginie... well, Virginie's rich third husband probably wouldn't care if his brother-in-law was had up on charges of having sexual relations with a pack of Sergyaran fuzzy crabs and sending the Empress an explicit holomessage inviting her to join in, but nor would Virginie raise a finger to help the rest of the family, either.

Virginie had never liked Piotr much. Piotr had occasionally, guiltily, wondered whether it was because she had been unceremoniously decanted into a uterine replicator the moment her sex was known so that their parents could have another try at conceiving a son before Commander Lord Vormarlow had to leave for war with Escobar, but it wasn't as if Piotr himself had had any choice in that, and in any case that particular practice had been outlawed now even in the rural districts. His hand slid upwards over the woman's palm. Their fingers tangled. "Don't call Notaras," he said, his voice husky.

Her hand felt _right_ in his, fitting there as if they'd been holding hands all their lives. She made another noise in her throat. This one sounded a bit like the annoyed tut that his eldest sister Kareen produced when interrupted in her studies, only shifted down an octave and made infinitely appealing.

Her face swam into view.

"Fob," he said, and collapsed again, back into the welcoming arms of the past.

\--

"But there _aren't_ any Vordodds," Piotr heard his sister Lavrenti proclaiming as he came into the sudden sunlight of his mother's upstairs receiving-room. It was a large, airy chamber, dominated by a large polished table and an array of weaponry on the walls which had been wielded by his ancestors in various conflicts. The cured skellytum panelling was still just about visible behind the martial paraphenalia. Through the wide window, Piotr could see an aircar in the drive. He'd seen it on the way in and assumed that it was bringing Mr Turanta the farm manager. Instead, it seemed to have dropped a wholly unwanted air-to-ground payload of sisters. Sitting around the table, drinking from his mother's china tea service, and in the throes of what Piotr's experienced fourteen-year-old eye recognised as an _almighty_ row, were not only his sisters Anna, Virginie, Lavrenti and Nicola - home, weeks before they were expected, from their boarding school in Vandeville - but, even more improbably, his eldest sister Kareen, who, the last he'd heard, was studying at Hassadar Women's University and keeping her nose in her books as befitted a recipient of the prestigious Lady Vorprosser's Scholarship.

Kareen cupped a hand against her brow and looked immensely weary. "I didn't _say_ his name was Vordodd."

"Yes, you did," contradicted Lavrenti bumptiously.

Hand on the door-handle, Piotr tried to sneak out again. His brother's senior Armsman, another Turanta, on protect-the-ladies-from-unexpected-kidnapping-and-hand-round-cakes duty and positively _radiating_ _I am not listening and this is none of my concern_, coughed meaningfully. "Lord Piotr Vormarlow!" he declaimed, grey drooping eyebrows and grey drooping moustache positively bouncing as he came to attention.

"Oh, there you are, Piotr." His mother did not look overjoyed to see yet another family member. "_You_ can pass the tea. Thank you, Turanta."

Armsman Turanta puffed his chest out and took position by the door, staring keenly out of the window in case kidnappers came from that direction instead. Virginie gave a sigh and stared up at the ceiling. "It's so _boring_ having an Armsman in the room all the time. It's old-fashioned. It's _provincial_."

"We _are_ provincial," said Nicola, giving her a disliking look and snatching a promising piece of cake out from under her hand. "We're about as provincial as you can get."

"That's no excuse for rudeness," said their mother sharply. "_Or_ for greed - really, Nicola, I don't know what that academy's supposed to be teaching you, especially considering that the estate's paying those outrageous surcharges for you and Lavrenti to take archery and charm - " Piotr took advantage of the ensuing contretemps to sneak an extra-large chunk of cake for himself.

"Have some tea too," said Anna, pouring for him. This drew the attention of their mother, who looked as if, at any other time, she would have made an issue of the cake. Piotr gave Anna a now-see-what-you've done look and wished, briefly, that he was the mutant on this week's episode of _The Adventures Of Captain Vortalon_, who could make people's heads explode. Not that he wanted to be a mutie, even to do Barrayar the noble service of ridding it of the overly helpful Anna before some unfortunate - unVortunate, Piotr thought with secret glee, making a quite unsharable pun - was saddled with her as a wife and found himself father to a brood of even more infuriatingly self-sacrificing children.

The door opened. Turanta snapped to quivering attention again, chest, moustache and eyebrows all vibrating in harmony. "Lady Irina Vormarlow!"

"Oh, hello, Turanta," said Irina, strolling in. "Your sister-in-law sent you a box of plums, they're in the kitchens, you'd better pick them up before Madame Arberti decides to make use of them."

She looked around, with growing astonishment and thin, raised blonde eyebrows, at the collection of sisters seated around the table. "My duty, Mama. Why the family reunion? Has that friend of Gennady's actually _offered_ for Virginie?"

The twins, Lavrenti and Nicola, joined Piotr in exchanging three-cornered, nauseated glances.

"It isn't Virginie," said Kareen wearily. "It's me."

"And it isn't Gennady's friend," said Lavrenti, bouncing up and down joyously in her chair in a way that Piotr had always thought that exclusive boarding schools for Vor young ladies were supposed to eradicate. "At least, I don't know whether he is or not, but I don't see why he _would_ know Gennady, because it's not as if Gennady's ever been stationed in Vorkosigan's District, and Kareen says his name's Vordodd..."

"I didn't say his name was Vordodd," snapped Kareen again, pushed beyond bearing, the creases in her blanched face making her look nearer their mother's age than Lavrenti's. She looked at Irina, who looked back, eyebrows still raised, with a very Irina expression. Not _aloof_ precisely, but certainly more detached than most people would find comfortable. Not that Irina had ever given the impression of floating offshore from the family - not the way that Anna occasionally did, offshore and paddling frantically - so much as possessing dominions in another dimension beyond them, which she governed with a firm but fair hand and not much interest. "It's just Dodd. Edwin Dodd. I met him in Hassadar..."

"I thought the brochure from Hassadar Women's said that they provided chaperones, _and_ fire-breathing matrons to guard the dormitory houses," said Piotr loudly. He'd meant it half comradely and half cutting-down-to-size, reminding Kareen that she was still down among the brood of Vormarlow siblings and a female at that, when she was so unexpectedly declaring her independence from them; but it came out sounding bullying and prurient, and Kareen looked more exhausted than ever. Piotr glowered furiously at his boots, and pushed another slice of cake at her by way of silent apology. She didn't seem to notice it.

"Maybe," said Lavrenti, romancing, as she made enthusiastic gestures in the air with her teacup, "his family were on the wrong side in the Saltpetre Conspiracy or something..."

"That implies a rather charming belief that there was a _right_ side in that particular debacle," murmured Irina, pouring herself a glass of grain liquor from the decanter on the sideboard, beneath a past Jofré Vormarlow's saddle, which he had used as a weapon during a scuffle with the Vormerigos' men which had broken out unexpectedly in the stables during his sister's wedding. Piotr supposed sadly that Kareen's wedding probably wouldn't be anything like as exciting. He'd probably have to wear a scratchy, high-necked family uniform and be polite to aunts.

"... and they decided to change their name until they'd _cleared_ their names, and they came up with Vordodd because..."

Kareen banged her cup down on the table. Their mother made a reproving noise. Piotr was all ready to look innocent when he realised that, for once, a loud noise at table was not being automatically assumed to be his fault. "His-name-is-not-Vordodd! It's not Vor-anything! And you may as well know the rest at once. He's forty-one, and he's a widower, and he has three children, and the term of his contract in Hassadar's coming up and he doesn't want to stay on there because he says their research methods are three hundred years out of date and he can't work in that atmosphere, so I thought Gennady could find him something to do here. _And_," she added, the teacup tinkling against its saucer as her hand shook, "the reason his name doesn't sound Barrayaran, before you say _anything else_, Lavrenti, is because he's not. He's Komarran."

The silence in the room was comprehensive. Lavrenti said blankly "How is the atmosphere in Hassadar any different to here? Is it more irradiated or something?" and was hushed by their mother. Nicola, who had fierce views on the Komarran conflict, went white. Piotr, whose historical allegiances were all safely buried further back in Barrayar's history, felt sorry for her, which was not something that happened particularly often. Nicola was his favourite sister, but she didn't encourage feeling sorry for her, oneself, or anybody else.

"How lovely for the children," said Anna. "To have a mother again, I mean."

Nicola stared at her as if she thought Anna might be a Komarran in disguise too. Their mother looked as if any utterance at all would be inadequate. Irina poured another glass out of the decanter and put it down in front of their mother, and then, rather more reluctantly, did the same for Kareen. Piotr thought about reaching out for one himself, since he was, after all, the man of the family in Gennady's absence, but couldn't quite nerve himself up to do it. Over by the doorway, Armsman Turanta was looking so glassy-eyed with suppressed disapproval that he looked as if he had died on duty a few years previously and been stuffed.

"_Which one_ of Gennady's friends did you say wanted to marry me?" demanded Virginie obliviously, and reached for cake.

\--

They were all, with the possible exception of Nicola, prepared to welcome Edwin Dodd and his bizarrely named Komarran children, and to silently, stoically and collectively pretend that this wasn't all a terrible, crumbling disaster on a scale to match the aptly named Mad Count Vormerigo's attempt to dam the sea four miles out from the bay in order to stop it keeping him awake at night.

They continued with the pretence, for Kareen's sake, but the goodwill towards Edwin evaporated quite soon after they met him. Piotr, in particular, felt that Edwin - that _Komarrans_ \- didn't know anything about the rules of Vor hospitality, and silently despised him for it, even more than they all despised him for knowing nothing about horses. The whole matter came to a head after Edwin raised a horsewhip to Piotr and Piotr challenged him to a duel over it, which led to an angry buzz of female relatives and no duel, in the end; and whilst Piotr knew that duelling was illegal, he thought that the Emperor was far enough away and Edwin near enough that it was worth risking it.

At least, he assured himself that that was how he _would_ have felt if his wretched, interfering mother and sisters hadn't unfairly got in the way of his defending the honour of his house by raising the two swords to what he silently called the Komarran Pretender; though whenever he tried to imagine how it might have been, even if he imagined Edwin cringingly surrendering the moment they stepped onto the field, he got a sick stumbling feeling in his belly and had to kick a wall to exorcise it.

The children were another matter. Charles and Rose, to their father's fulminating annoyance, had become Carl and Rosa, first to Madame Arberti and Armsman Turanta, and then to Piotr and his sisters and finally to the entire household; Phoebe, the youngest, and the only one whose name would pass just as well on Barrayar as on Komarr, looked up at them with round brown boot-button eyes and demanded that _she_ have a new name too.

"Fob," said Nicola decidedly, and held out her hand, a great concession in Nicola, who was not fond of being touched. "Would you like to come with me and see where they're going to build the monorail?"

"_Carl_ likes monorails," said Fob scornfully. She ignored Nicola's hand completely and extended an imperative solidly chubby arm towards Piotr, on her other side, instead. "_I'm_ doing same's Peter."

"_Piotr_," said Lavrenti explainingly.

Piotr said nothing. He had expected to be the one to take charge of Carl, an eager human rubber band with red hair, and leave the infantry to kindly Anna; but no one had ever liked him best before, and even a Komarran female who might or might not be old enough to take herself behind a bush when nature called was better than nothing.

Fob liked him best.

\--

There was a knock at the door.

"Ma'am, should I hide him?" demanded Lieutenant Vorroux wildly. "Under the..." He looked around. The bar's back room was devoid of feminine flounces. His wrist com buzzed. He stared at it as if he expected it to explode and turn his arm into a mess to rival that of his superior officer at any moment.

"Vorroux, open this door at once," said Second Officer Notaras.


	3. Chapter 3

Piotr realised, at last, why it was that he'd never liked Notaras. He didn't like Vorroux, either. It had been a mistake to think that he'd _ever_ liked Vorroux. He'd been gravely deceived in the man and he planned to see that the reasons for his disappointment went down on Vorroux' permanent record. As for the reason why, one only had to look over at the pair of them, seated on either side of Fob looking at a holobook of views of Longshot with precisely the shy-forest-creatures-transplanted-into-a-chintz-parlour air as all the men who had come to call on Virginie and Anna with honourable intentions.

After all these years, _Fob_. She was nothing like the image of her that he had carried around with him, and yet entirely herself. Her thirty-one-year-old self, composed and capable and undoubtedly the only woman in the Nexus with the possible exception of Empress Laisa who could wear Komarran trousers and not look like a figure of fun, had snapped cleanly over his memories like a protective cover, not so much erasing as augmenting them.

What he actually _wanted_ to say was 'Fob, what are you doing running a bar on Vega Station?' but that was Vormarlow family business and not to be aired in front of the likes of Notaras and Vorroux. He settled for a weak cough and "Why in the name of Emperor Ghev Vorbarra the Younger's undescended left testicle is there a _Komarran bar_ on this station, and why didn't Ivan Vorpatril warn me about it? And where _is_ Ivan Vorpatril?"

The central question of the three not needing an answer, since it was encompassed in _Because Ivan Vorpatril is an idiot_, Notaras and Vorroux addressed themselves to the first and third, though Vorroux looked as if he might be about to preface his reply with a homily on proper language in front of womenfolk. Which was nonsense, anyway, because it wasn't a woman, it was _Fob_. If he'd been asked to describe her appearance fifteen years down the line from when he'd last seen her, he didn't think he would have predicted the multiple-stranded necklace of amber beads that set off her decided chin, let alone the smoky eye makeup or the accomplished coil of her dark hair, but now he'd seen them, they were exactly what he would have expected.

"I believe Commander Harrap said that the Komarrans are mostly workers and engineers on the planetary soletta array project, sir," said Notaras. "They have the relevant experience. You remember the most interesting lecture..."

"I do remember it. It's the single reason I'm not grateful that the auto-needler went into my arm and not my brain."

Vorroux coughed. "I'm not sure where Lord Vorpatril is, sir. Would you like me to try his wrist-com?"

"He wasn't involved in the... contretemps in the bar?" _Thank God for that at least_.

Vorroux looked puzzled. "No, sir, thinking about it, he _did_ say he'd meet me there - "

"He said he'd meet me there, too."

" - but he didn't turn up, and now that Madame Dodd's shut the bar for the evening, I assume he's gone elsewhere. Which reminds me, when is _Mr_ Dodd expected?" Vorroux bowed from the waist to Fob. Piotr suppressed a small flare of irritation, only partly caused by noticing that Vorroux still _had_ a waist. "Had I the inestimable honour to be your husband, dear lady, neither auto-needler nor plasma flare would keep me from rushing to your side."

"There is no Mr Dodd. Well, there are two - " Vorroux blinked, visibly realigning his views on Komarran morals, " - but my father lives in Equinox Dome on Komarr with my stepmother, and my brother Carl is an Imperial scout pilot, of all things."

Vorroux blinked again, obviously adding _at least one relative in honourable Imperial service_ to his mental dossier on Fob. Piotr wished he could give the young pup the entirety of the outside of the _Prince Dorca_ to scrub to take his mind off courting women. He contented himself with growling "She's five years older than you, Vorroux."

Vorroux spluttered. Fob removed herself from between the two Imperial officers and swayed over to check the sed-patch on his neck. Yes, she definitely swayed. He didn't remember her ever swaying before. On all previous occasions, she'd stomped. At least he'd extricated her from the clutches of Vorroux and Notaras, _ha_, even if there was a very familiar wrinkle of irritation on her square brow. "I don't remember you having any kind of adverse reaction to these that time you broke your collarbone," she said. "Though I suppose you've been exposed to all kinds of chemicals since."

"You two _know_ each other?" said Vorroux.

"It's complicated," said Piotr sourly.

"It's not complicated at all," Fob contradicted him. "His sister married my father."

"But you say you have a father and a brother living? So he isn't your legal guardian?" pressed Vorroux, far too eagerly.

Fob looked at Piotr. "No," she said, her voice complicated and Komarran and deep. "He's not."

He had always found her round, darkest-treacle-brown eyes pretty much unreadable, too densely packed full of the ineffable Nexus of Fob for him to in any way comprehend them any more than he understood the equations that allowed the likes of Carl Dodd to fling themselves, insanely daring, from star to star. Seeing the same eyes made larger and considerably more knowing by application of cosmetics didn't in any way _help_. But he always felt rather more solidly sure of his _own_ place in the universe after she rested her full attention on him, and that hadn't changed. Generally people _other_ than Fob only gave Piotr their full attention when things had gone wrong.

"Why are you painted up like a Cetagandan?" Piotr enquired, seeing that she had withdrawn the gift of her attention and bestowed it on the undeserving Notaras instead.

"That's the sedative talking. I don't engage in discussions with sedatives. They're very dull conversationalists." Fob turned away gracefully. "Mr Notaras, I think you wanted to say something to Captain Vormarlow about this book of views of Longshot the Commander arranged to give you?"

"I've already had a sedative, I don't need to be bored to sleep," said Piotr ungratefully.

"With all due respect, ma'am, I do not believe that you hold a current Barrayaran Imperial Security clearance," said Notaras to Fob. He didn't precisely push a pair of small spectacles up his nose - possessing a pair of spectacles would have marred the perfect anonymity of his bland olive countenance, and in any case the Fleet mandated yearly eye examinations and compulsory surgery if the examining doctor found it necessary - but he certainly gave that impression.

"Fine. You can get out of my back room, then, and go and tell him about the secret of the holobook somewhere else," said Fob with almost Irina-like briskness. "I suggest aboard the _Prince Dorca_. I wouldn't like to swear that there's anywhere _else_ on the station that isn't bugged. Though I did think it was a bit suspicious, the way ghem-Colonel Demaro's boys willingly shifted out of the only dock-and-lock with reliable tubes, and insisted on doing their own cleanup afterwards. Also, considering the Cetagandans'... proclivities, I'd make sure you swab clean anything he bleeds on. I don't want them tailoring retroviruses to his DNA."

Piotr wanted to say that he didn't think they'd do anything so inelegant, but a throb of pain in his hand silenced him. Notaras regarded Fob. Fob regarded Notaras. Piotr could have told the man that he was facing a task akin to politely asking the Black Escarpment to shift two metres to the left, but it would, he thought smugly, be a much more lasting lesson if Notaras found out for himself. Piotr leaned back in his chair and would have folded his arms if one of them hadn't hurt so much. Vorroux at least had the horse-sense to stay out of it, or was possibly too bowled over by Fob's presence to find words, it was hard to tell.

"Ma'am," said Notaras, "following the precedent of Colonel Count Vorhartung, who was forced to hold a council of war in Lady Vorlightly's sitting-room due to being confined to Vorlightly Castle during a snowstorm, I must ask you in the Emperor's name to turn your face to the wall and put your hands over your ears."

Fob looked down her nose at him. Fob's nose was not the proper aquiline shape for looking down, but she managed it all the same. "What the Emperor does is his own business, but I would strongly advise _you_ not to go confusing _all_ Komarran women's sexual preferences with those of Dr. Toscane-Vorbarra," she advised him kindly.

That got a reaction out of Vorroux, if not out of Notaras. Piotr glared at his fleet legal officer and hoped Vorroux wasn't imagining _any_ of the erotic possibilities that speech of Fob's had conjured up. Also, he'd changed his mind; Komarran trousers were indecent on _anybody_, and someone ought to bring a bill in front of the Council of Counts to outlaw them, possibly as part of an effort to support struggling Barrayaran skirt-and-bolero manufacturers. He supposed, belatedly, that it was a captain's responsibility to take charge in situations like this. "I vouch for her, Notaras," he said. "She is a dependent of my House, and as such - "

"As such, your House doesn't seem to see anything wrong with letting her live a quite unprotected life on a criminally rickety habitat, _sir_," said Vorroux with what Piotr considered quite unnecessary sarcasm. "Why, the comfort station in my quarters almost _exploded_ when I was trying to get the meter to return what it had overcharged me..."

"I know that, I heard every splash and every oath through the wall," snapped Piotr before it occurred to him that _You are sailing perilously close to insubordination, Mr Vorroux_ would have been a better retort. He said it anyway, but it didn't seem to have much effect. "She is a person of honour. On _my_ honour as Vormarlow, I swear it."

Fob looked as if she was trying to suppress laughter. For a moment, he could quite see why Vorroux was entranced. He couldn't imagine how anyone could _not_ be entranced. "_Barrayarans_," she murmured under her breath.

"You've lived on Barrayar since you were five!" said Piotr, stung.

She regarded him coolly. "I lived on Barrayar between the ages of four and eighteen. There's a difference."

"Very well," said Notaras in tones of the most distaste Piotr had ever heard out of him. One of the new breed, Piotr thought savagely, who thought that the more Barrayar became like Beta or Escobar the better for everybody, and found words like _honour_ an embarrassment. "Under the circumstances, I believe I have no option but to accept you as the repository and guardian of Miss Dodd's honour. I shall, of course, be making a full report."

"I do _have_ an honour of my own," said Fob, her voice suddenly no longer smoky but loud and plangent and entirely Fob-like.

"I thought you said you weren't Barrayaran," said Piotr in a voice that only she could hear.

Fob looked annoyed with herself, though Piotr couldn't see why; unless her admirers were fools, which admittedly they both were in his estimation, they would realise that she was even more endearing when she was letting herself be honest. Not that he was willing to accept either of them as a whatever-one-counted-it-in-law, and he would tell her so the first private moment they got. Notaras wasn't even Vor, and Vorroux had an unsuitable passion for the bagpipes, and if those two perfectly good arguments didn't weigh with her, he would remind her that one was a second officer and the other a flunkey of Fleet Legal and she deserved an Admiral Count Vorsomething at the very least.

"If Miss Dodd does not consider herself bound by Barrayaran codes of honour..." Notaras began fussily.

Piotr waved a hand. "Let's say she does for the moment."

"Very well. I believe that this holobook of views of Longshot which we were given during the welcome ceremony contains certain coded information. Since Station Commander Harrap could have requested a meeting with you or Lord Ivan or both in order to convey such information had it originated from her, I must believe that the holobook was substituted by another hand, possibly Superintendent Rochard, who had the opportunity..."

"Haven't you ever heard of _plausible deniability_?" interrupted Piotr, made impatient by another spasm in his hand.

"What does it _say_?" asked Fob, leaning forward in a way that made Notaras sit up slightly taller and Vorroux look like a man who'd just been told he'd won the District Lottery.

"It contains certain equations," said Notaras primly, "which I have not of course had time to check rigorously myself, but which appear most plausible to my untutored eye, suggesting that not one but three new wormholes lie undiscovered off Longshot. The perturberation of the habitat's orbit..."

"They can tell there are wormholes by how Longshot _wobbles_, sir?" said Vorroux. Piotr glared at him, not at all convinced that it was Longshot's wobbling that Vorroux was thinking about.

"If any of these wormholes should prove of military interest, then Longshot - and, by extension, Vega Station - become of considerable strategic importance," Notaras concluded. "I believe Lord Ivan should be informed at once, sir."

Piotr snorted. "If you want to tell the Cetas, why don't you just go and tell them straight out? If you let the news slip out to them via Vorpatril there's at least the _possibility_ he'll get the wrong end of the sword-hilt and tell them that Longshot's broken out in three separate strains of the worm plague and one of them's eating through the hull."

"Yes, sir," said Notaras in that tone that meant the exact opposite. "May I remind you that Lord Ivan is the Emperor's sworn representative, and that the consequences of withholding vital information from one's Emperor in time of war..."

"One auto-needler doesn't make a war," interrupted Fob in her rich deep voice. She was getting almost as good at interrupting Notaras, Piotr thought with pleasurable pride, as he was, and she'd had much less practice. "I do agree that if this information gets into the wrong hands there will _be_ a war, and a whole lot of innocent stationers and transients and Komarran soletta array workers will be caught in the middle of it."

Piotr gave her a wounded look that was designed to convey _what about innocent Barrayaran Imperial Fleet personnel, then?_ She smiled at him. It was a very good smile. On anyone but Fob, her mouth would have been too wide and shapeless, but as it was, it was an exact repository for smiles. "Can you transmit the information on a secure channel from the _Prince Dorca_? I doubt there's a reliably secure connection anywhere else between here and Kshatriya."

"It must have been terrible for you, having to live in a place like this, Miss Dodd," said Vorroux earnestly. "I am certain that, under the Fleet's duty to repatriate distressed citizens, we could offer you a berth on the _Prince Dorca_. We have a female member of medical staff," he added very proudly. "One of the very first to go through the Academy." Piotr wasn't sure whether he was offering Medtech-Ensign Tepesh as proof of Barrayaran progress or merely as a chaperone so that Fob wouldn't have to go unprotected among a ravening all-male crew.

"No one's _assaulted_ me," said Fob, frowning under her thick chocolate-brown brows as she missed the point. "They wouldn't dare, they know I've got a veterinary stunner under the bar with enough of a charge to drop a horse."

Vorroux sat back in his chair and looked pleased. It took a moment for Piotr to reason out why, and then he felt his cheeks reddening with fury. Vorroux, curse his boots, had parsed that, along with _I do have an honour of my own_, as a declaration of eligible, all-but-Vor virginity, and as close to a declaration of interest as a lady of quality could make short of casting her eyes modestly downward and saying _I think you should speak to my father about that, sir_.

"I believe we _should_ inform Lord Ivan, sir," said Vorroux, even _sounding_ smug. "We must consider it our duty to discover whether this information has reached the Cetagandans..." Piotr just about resisted the temptation to growl _Oh, we must, must we?_ "...and Lord Ivan is the only one who possesses both previous diplomatic experience with the Cetagandans and a cast-iron reason to socialise with them. The negotiations..."

Piotr realised guiltily that he had never actually bothered to ask anyone what the negotiations were about. "Summarise the point of these negotiations, Vorroux," he rasped.

"Longshot, Vega and Kierlundy - the planet, sir - are considering amalgamating into a single political and economic unit. The Emperor was invited to send a neutral mediator."

Piotr's diplomatic headache blossomed into a full-blown migraine. "And he sent _Ivan Vorpatril_?"

"He's been here before," said Fob deeply. "Something to do with escort duty for a convoy that got attacked on its way to Escobar and had to dock here for repairs. I only remember because someone said he was making a fuss about getting to Escobar in time for a wedding." Piotr considered whether he cared about which of Ivan's friends and relatives might be getting married on Escobar, and decided that he didn't. "_ Anyway_, I haven't met Lord Ivan, unless he's the Vorpatril who was hanging about after Virginie a few years ago, and even if he is that Vorpatril I wouldn't say I met him to _talk_ to, but from what you've said he's not the Emperor's top-rank negotiator."

"Perhaps not, Miss Dodd," said Vorroux cautiously.

"Well, then." Fob leaned back, gathering the threads of the conversation about her like a gaggle of early-spring lambs encouraged towards the warmth of the hearth and looking _deeply_ pleased with herself. "Have you _seen_ Vega Station?"

Piotr thought about the docks-and-locks section, which had been tatty to the point of almost being classifiable as an active personnel hazard; the flickering light-panels, the nauseating fluctuations in the artificial gravity, the ever-present smells; and concluded that she had a point. "Do you know if they asked the Cetagandans too?"

"They might have done." Fob stretched, luxuriously, in a way that made Vorroux' Adam's apple bob. "No offence meant, but I don't think they were actually expecting _either_ Emperor to send anybody. They just didn't want either one to say that he felt affronted by not being asked and come in with gunships blazing. Especially with Vega Station only being a couple of jumps from Sigma Ceta."

Piotr sat up, leaned forward, and propped his good arm on his knee. The sedatives were, mercifully, beginning to turn all the feelings in his left arm to a fuzzed-together nothingness. "Very well. Vorroux, go and find Lord Ivan and bring him here."

"But - your hand - the medical facilities on the _Prince Dorca_, sir!"

Piotr gritted his teeth. "We may not have _time_ for me to waste getting across the station to the _Prince Dorca_ and back so that I can sit in a draughty medbay answering damn fool questions and having my arm strapped up. Fob, if this place _is_ as corrupt as you say, I imagine you know someone who can fix up this arm of mine, no questions asked and no marching down the main corridors. Notaras..." He hesitated. "Notaras, keep working on those equations."

Vorroux leapt to his feet and hurried out. Fob watched him go with what Piotr considered a far too indulgent smile. "Keen, isn't he?" she said in that voice that was almost a rumble.

"I could work very much better if I fetched my comp," said Notaras, rising to his feet. "And, since you are relatives, I suppose there is no objection to my leaving Miss Dodd in your company."

Fob hugged her plump knees in their silky pale-caramel trousers and looked hopelessly amused at her promotion - or demotion, Piotr wasn't sure how she'd consider it - to respectable Vor virgin. Piotr returned Notaras' salute - not as crisply as he would like, the sedatives were spreading to the rest of his nerves - with his good hand. The door closed behind the second officer.

"So," said Fob eventually, all the amusement scrubbed out of her voice like impurities from that 78% cocoa dark chocolate they made in Vorfolse's District. "We didn't part on particularly good terms."

"That was fifteen years ago."

"I haven't forgotten," she said levelly.

Neither had he.

\--

Twenty-five-year-old Ensign Piotr Vormarlow - still an ensign, when a good quarter of his graduating class were lieutenants - woke up with a start as the monorail swung round the last long curve into Vandeville. It had been a long journey. This was the penultimate, red-eye stage, bringing him into Vandeville thirty infernal hours after leaving Vorbarr Sultana. He hadn't _wanted_ to travel by monorail, ferry and monorail again with no companion but his own morose thoughts; but the prospect of staying in Vorbarr Sultana and watch the consequences of his latest misjudgment ripple out among the gossip network appealed even less, and he couldn't afford a chartered flight and didn't want to trespass even further on his father's good will by asking for a line of credit.

If he'd _had_ to make a bad judgment call about what looked, to all sensors in range, exactly like a flotilla of unpowered drop pods spiralling lazily towards the wind-lashed, leggy metal rig of Novymir Weather Station, Piotr thought, pressing his hot brow against the glass window as the lighted maw of the Vandeville Monorail Terminal swung into view, why, oh, why had he done so in the presence of his fellow-Ensign, Anastas Vorrutyer? Not that there was any harm in Stasha Vorrutyer, but the man's _family_ were all unmitigated poison, and, in Byerly Vorrutyer's case, waspishly amused poison at that. Piotr could imagine him doing an impression of Piotr's bumbling explanation, probably in an unfairly broad Southern Continent accent. _No, sir, I had no idea that would happen when I gave orders to fire on the Seventy-Third Annual Bonsanklar Balloon Festival..._

The monorail juddered to a stop. Piotr made his way through baggage reclaim, feeling as if a layer of his skin had been scoured away all over, including a layer of cells from the surface of his eyeballs. The station was lit too brightly and whitely, and everything looked vaguely nightmarish, from the enamelled countenances of the Emperor and Count Vormerigo facing each other over a ceremonial arch to the worried-looking fellow in a ridiculously pink House uniform who was pacing to and fro holding up a sign reading _The Dowager Lady Vorlakial_ behind a tape-barrier.

Piotr hadn't expected anyone to meet him; he'd expected to grab a few hours sleep on a chair and then wander out into Vandeville and hope for a lift from one of the Turantas or the post-wagon or one of Count Vormerigo's minions. Nevertheless, there was a skirted figure seated by the door, dark brown head buried in a book, and radiating _don't bother me_ so strongly she might as well have had her fingers in her ears. She looked up; looked delighted, in that fierce, frowning Fob way, straightened her skirt and her embroidered bolero, and flung herself towards him. Piotr barely had time to put down his valise and brace for impact. She had grown tall since he'd last seen her, and her hair was pinned up. She left her arms looped loosely around his neck as she studied his face, biting her lip a little. Piotr expected she was disappointed by the continuing lack of lieutenant's tabs on his standard-issue greatcoat.

"Hey, go canoodle with your girl somewhere else, will you?" snarled the man in the pink uniform. "You're in the way of the Dowager Lady Vorlakial's floatchair."

Piotr was about to dispute both the man's facts and his tone of voice when Fob took possession of his arm instead and dragged him out of the way of the Dowager, an intimidating iron-grey presence in a floatchair that could probably have been used to make a ramming attack on fortifications. "I brought us horses. The Idiot and that cob of Turanta's. Come on."

Well-brought-up Rosa, even with her ten early years of Komarran independence, would never have dared to borrow the aging pony The Idiot Boy from the Vormarlow Tsenàly stables, let alone the cob on which Armsman Turanta was wont to follow his master on visits to back-country villages; even Carl, darling of Madame Arberti and the Turantas alike, would probably have hesitated; but Fob had absolutely no truck with such social terrors. She had undoubtedly checked that neither the Idiot nor the cob were _wanted_ that day, Piotr salved his conscience. And it would be an unexpected pleasure to ride back to Vormarlow Tsenàly, instead of having to put up with the slow jogging post-wagon or with somebody's well-meaning _conversation_. He breathed the early-morning Vandeville air appreciatively. There was nothing like the Southern Continent's own blend of seaspray, fish and flower markets, horse manure and various airborne irritants. And something else. "Fob, are you wearing _perfume_?"

"There's no reason why I shouldn't, is there? Come along, I only paid for an hour in the short-stay stables."

Dawn had broken by the time they arrived back at the gates of Vormarlow Tsenàly, and Piotr had told her all about the balloon festival, and the contretemps with his senior officer, and - worst of all - the suggestion that had been made that he might like to slide sideways into the newly formed Imperial Observer Corps and become a military photographer.

Fob put out her gloved hands to him; he caught her around the waist and swung her neatly down out of her side-saddle. It put him in uncomfortable proximity to the scent. She did not seem particularly inclined to move. She wrinkled her nose. "Well, _I_ think it's a very good idea. Why don't you?"

"Is that all you think of me?" All of his tiredness seemed to have fallen onto his shoulders at once, along with a double helping of infuriated hurt that _Fob_ of all people thought he wasn't good enough to make it in the Emperor's _real_ Service. He had always told his troubles to Fob. Of course, he hadn't expected her to _understand_ them. Maybe he should stop telling them to her, now that she was a young lady in long skirts and would be receiving callers soon. He hoped they wouldn't include Padma Vormerigo, who had recently caused infuriated feelings first by failing to offer for Nicola and then by trifling with the feelings of the six-years-married-and-heartily-bored Virginie.

"What do you mean, is that all I think of you?" Fob frowned. She turned to nod her thanks to the stable-boy coming to take the horses. The stable-boy accidentally fell foul of the full force of the frown and effaced himself hastily.

"I _told_ you," Piotr told the log-and-cedar-shake wall of the stables, which seemed easier than telling Fob. "Captain Lord Vormuir might as well have offered me a medical discharge on the grounds of being a congenital fool. As it is, he offers me _this_! No chance of a ship of my own, _ever_, no..." He banged a fist into the opposite palm. "Why couldn't he just have had me publicly flogged and had done with it?"

"Maybe he likes you."

"He does not like me. He told me that I was a disaster waiting to happen to the prestige of the Barrayaran Empire and the safety of its men, and that I had critically poor judgment both of men and of situations."

"Maybe he likes you anyway," Fob suggested. "I do."

She put one hand up to his cheek. He wasn't sure what it was doing there at first, and then she cupped the other hand against the other side of his face, gently, as if he were something precious rather than the all-time screwup of the Imperial Service, and pressed her lips against his. Not just her lips, either. Her whole half-grown body, firm and distractingly young through the layers of embroidered cloth. To his horror, his body responded. He deserved to be flogged, and not just for ruining the Bonsanklar Balloon Festival. He put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her, firmly, back into the realm of honour, and himself too.

"Despite what you may have been told on Komarr," he said tightly, "it is _not_ Vor custom, even in country districts, to take advantage of one's underage female relatives."

She stared at him. Her mouth tightened. Her hands gripped in her skirts. And then she turned and pelted away, towards the dower house where Kareen and her husband resided, and out of the stableyard and the beginning bustle of the morning.

\--

"Do you still have your holocamera?" Fob asked levelly.

"I have a better one."

There was a sudden loud crash from the direction of the bar. "_What_...?" said Fob, hurrying to the doorway to look through the spyhole, her expression suggesting that she expected frustrated drinkers than anything worse. Whatever she saw through the spyhole didn't change her mind. She opened the door. "This bar is _closed_," she announced in a voice that made clear that if she said it, it was so.

The only answer was a low buzz that Piotr recognised in the rising hairs on the backs of his arms before he recognised it in his ears. _Stunner fire_. Fob crumpled to the ground in horrible slow-motion. Piotr got to his feet. He hadn't realised how much he relied on his arms for balance. He wasn't in time to catch her. A gaggle of men in tatty grey Station Security armbands were fanning out into the bar.

Accompanying them was the tall stalwart figure of ghem-Colonel Demaro. _Set up_, Piotr's thoughts howled, set up by someone who knew at least as much about plausible deniability as he did. Of course ghem-Colonel Demaro wouldn't use his own troops when Station Security were so easily bribable, and, more to the point, _known_ to be so easily bribable, and therefore not the sort of people for whom anyone would weep if they died of unexplained causes before they could be interrogated under fast-penta. Demaro turned towards one of the men. It was impossible to read his impression through the warpaint. Piotr reached for his sidearm.

Station Security fired their stunners again, twice.


	4. Chapter 4

When Piotr woke, the station was rocking to and fro in an arrhythmic but not unpleasant way, and the sea was slapping at the sides of the habitat.

That couldn't be right. He opened his eyes. The air was sharply cold all around him, and smelt of salt. Above him was a clear dark sky, studded with unfamiliar stars, and a swirl of galactic arm like a spatter of luminescent paint from a child's paintbrush. A segment of the sky was blotted to black. He wondered whether it was obscured by the half-built soletta array, and then realised that, no, that wasn't a soletta array, that was a _sail_. Peeking from behind it to one side was a pale, low and outsized moon. He counted three more moons in a few seconds' looking for them, including a pearl-blue one camouflaged against the bright beautiful spill of the galaxy.

"Oh, you're _awake_," said Fob. "Thank heaven. I woke up once when they were stuffing us into a shuttle and I thought they were going to take us beyond the habitat's sensor range and shove us out of an airlock, and then I woke up again when we made landfall and Miakh managed to break free and thump the one who was taking his makeup off, but you didn't wake up at all. I thought the stuff they sprayed under our noses must be interacting with the sedative I gave you somehow. I have never been gladder that I didn't contribute to the Security Veterans' Benevolent Fund when they came round asking. I don't know how long we've been here or how far we've drifted or in what direction, or whether we're close enough to anything resembling a shore that I ought to be worrying about rocks. There's a light somewhere over _that_ way, but Miakh thinks it might be bioluminescence."

"_Miakh?_" said Piotr, the question trumping _Did you mean to sound like we've been kidnapped and taken planetside by transvestites disguised as Vega Station Security?_ and _Why are we in a boat?_ in the queue to be answered. He sat up. His hand was throbbing. Whatever Fob had sedated him with, it had definitely worn off. He tried, experimentally, to move his thumb. It was a very bad idea.

"Oh, good God, are you going to be sick?" demanded Fob unsympathetically, misinterpreting why he had gone pale. He shook his head. Cold touched its fingers to parts of his skin that had previously been more or less shielded by the way the collar and sleeves of his uniform fell. Why couldn't whoever left them with a boat have left them with a supply of warm, multi-micro-layered shipsuits too? _Pray all the ancestors it's not an open dinghy_...

A look around quelled that fear at least. It was a yacht, if a somewhat cramped one. He was lying on one side of the cockpit. There was the tiller, with something beside it that might - let his luck hold still - be controls for an engine, though no comforting panel of lights shone up in the dark. The yacht was rigged in a particularly odd fashion that looked like a display of national flags or possibly a very postmodern tent, and there had to be a cabin or something below, because here was Fob producing a man out of it, through the cramped flapping doors.

"Miakh," said Fob descriptively.

_Oh good_, Piotr thought ungratefully, _another mouth to feed out of whatever rations they left us, if any._ The man was tall and bullet-headed, with a hawk nose, but other facial features curiously delicate and almost womanly. The other noticeable thing about him, obvious even in this lack of light, was that he looked as if he'd stuck his face in a sonic scrubber. Piotr wondered what had actually _done_ that. Radiation? Over-enthusiastic decontamination procedures? _Please, let it not be sunburn, and we've already been out here a week..._

"Ghem-Colonel Miakh Demaro," expanded Fob. The man bowed slightly. "And no, he doesn't have any more idea why we're planetside than you or I do. Apparently one of his observers reported the scuffle at the bar, and he was concerned enough to call Station Security."

"That's your story, is it?" snarled Piotr.

"It is the truth," stated Demaro, standing arms akimbo in a way that caused Piotr to wish the yacht's outlandish rig included a handy boom to swipe him overboard.

Fob went to the tiller, which had been lashed, and examined it doubtfully. Piotr, looking past her head and shoulders - still Fob-shaped, he would have known them from any other shadowy shape from here to the other end of the Nexus - saw that there was indeed a light, ahead and slightly to port. It looked too high above the water to be bioluminescence, whatever the Cetagandan thought. In any case, it was their only indication of where land might be, and they had to keep it within striking distance, at least until the sun rose. Piotr hoped desperately that this wasn't one of those planets that went in for eighty-hour nights. A single outsized moon _could_ slow down planetary rotation. He didn't know what a gaggle of mini-moons might do.

Demaro was still pontificating at him, as if his personal view on this ghastly affair could possibly be more important than getting the three of them safely to what land there might be. "I was given most stringent instructions to do nothing to compromise my Empire's diplomatic relationship with yours, nor to let the relationship be compromised by my inactivity. I believed it would be less - inflammatory - if I came, as I believed, to your aid with Station Security, rather than my own personal guard. I was as astonished as you when Station Security turned their stunners on you. And then," he added with a much better grace than Piotr would have been able to manage under the circumstances, "upon me."

"If that's true," said Piotr slowly, "_who are Station Security working for?_"

Demaro shrugged. "Not I, certainly. I am informed that you are not as well-liked as you might be, among your crew. Could this be mutiny?"

"That is an outrageous suggestion!" Piotr spluttered.

"Is it a likely one?"

The two men glared at each other. Fob shook her head and sat down, packed into a corner of the cockpit like a small and tidy reverse figurehead, the wind whipping at her damp hair. "You don't know anything about Barrayarans, do you, Miakh? If they'd wanted to mutiny, they'd have shot him. Or stabbed him, maybe. Or..."

"Yes, yes, all _right_, Fob," Piotr interrupted uncomfortably.

"Besides," continued Fob, "only an idiot would try to kill a man from the coast of the Southern Continent and a man from a waterworld by putting them on a _boat_. And in my experience of the Barrayaran military, the idiots don't have to resort to mutiny to get themselves promoted."

"You're from a waterworld?" said Piotr hopefully.

Demaro made another tiny bow, this one accompanied by a smug smilelet. "I am from Sigma Ceta."

The wind was rising and making that peculiar rig - really, it reminded Piotr of nothing more than one of the large laundry-drying apparatus that had been in use at Novymir Weather Station - rattle about, which meant that Piotr had to address the ghem-Colonel in an undignified bellow. Some of the time the wind seemed to be coming from the same direction as Fob's light, which _might_ be more evidence that there was land that way (though surely if the stars were up it was too late for a shore breeze) but most of it seemed to be coming from all angles at once. "Can - you - sail?" he repeated for the third time.

Demaro's answer was torn away in the teeth of the wind. He staggered over - _landsman_, Piotr thought, whatever the albedo of Sigma Ceta - and shouted in Piotr's ear. Eventually Piotr understood what he was saying, which was that he had some experience of creating aesthetically pleasing water-mazes and his sister made a hobby of designing marine predators.

"Because there aren't enough marine predators out there without crazy ghem-ladies adding to them," shouted Piotr back with entirely false bonhomie. The stern lifted a good half-metre further than he was expecting, leading him to worry that the marine predators came when their name was called like the mutie sorceror in the story, but it was just an uncomfortably crosswise swell. Piotr wasn't sure whether it was the planet's bizarre tides or some oddity in the shape of the coastline or a combination of both, but Kierlundy's seas seemed to default to _badly unsettled_ with an option on _churning like there's some giant idiot out there playing with a pestle and mortar_.

Demaro drew his shoulders back. "At any other time, I would demand that you withdraw that remark about my sister," he snarled in Piotr's ear with enough venom to crisp Piotr's eardrums. "You may not know that she and I are the children of ghem-General Lukan Demaro and the haut Annber Giaja."

Piotr didn't, and it didn't convey anything to him, either, but _Giaja_ at least was a familiar name. "So you're about as related to your Emperor as Ivan Vorpatril is to ours?" he suggested, stifling a gasp of pain as the boat danced sideways and jarred his bad arm.

Demaro looked sick, though it was hard to tell whether this was because Piotr had committed yet another ghastly breach of Cetagandan etiquette or merely because he was offended at being compared to Ivan. Piotr decided to give it all up as a bad job. He staggered to the tiller and started to free it, painfully slowly, with the cramped fingers of his good hand. Fob leaned over and did it for him. The tiller jumped in his hand and then settled, a comforting familiar responsive shape against his palm. He felt the first twinge of liking towards this yacht; it was a willing little ship, after all, and he was grateful for it, particularly since as far as he could see there had been nothing to _stop_ their kidnappers dumping them into the sea in the vacuum-packed sacs that Vega Station used to bag up its waste prior to recycling.

He scooped himself painfully round in the cockpit to look at the panel below and to one side of the tiller. Some of the controls remained, but he couldn't tell for what kind of engine, or whether it was at all functional. For all he knew the settlers of Kierlundy were of that species of peculiar religious fundamentalists who insisted on fossil fuels. Looking up, there was no compass either, only a torn-out hole.

The light was no longer ahead of them. He looked around for it. There it was, flaring up on the horizon behind them. They were rattling along despite the manifest uselessness of the rig. Damn, damn, the yacht must have found a current whilst he'd wasted time playing mine's-bigger-than-yours with an idiot from Sigma Ceta, and now they might be carried away into the middle of the Marisco Ocean by morning. Or, worse, onto one of the jagged, rocky shorelines that made the planet look so picturesque from orbit.

If the Cetagandan hadn't been sitting there, hunched down and miserable and still notionally within earshot, Piotr might have murmured encouraging things to the yacht as if she were a nervy horse. As it was, he tried to turn her, and found it much more difficult than he had anticipated. For one thing, even using his good arm seemed to set up some kind of harmonic reaction in his bad arm that twinged like some ghastly sadomasochistic harp, and also across his back and shoulders; and for another, the sails seemed to be actively working against him.

As far as he could tell, at least two of the sails were doing nothing useful (_as much use as balls on a skellytum_, his brain provided, unexpectedly pungent, and in the gloomy tones of his friend Vorzilbis on being informed that he was being sent as diplomatic attaché to Aslund on the strength of having a grandfather who was known for his eccentric hobby of breeding messenger pigeons, which were apparently still a valid means of communication on that particular dustball) and might, indeed, actually be taking the wind from those that might have helped them go in the direction he wanted. The controls for the sails, unhelpfully, were not here. Evidently the designer of this yacht had envisaged one man at the tiller and another at the sails, both enjoying a day out on the water without having to communicate with another human soul, or even look at one. Alternatively and possibly more likely, the designer had been as crazy as Demaro's sister.

"Demaro, get over here and take the tiller!" he shouted, and added some more instructions that were lost in the gathering wind. "Keep her going like this - can you do that? Pretend you're in a three-dimensional environment designing a bloody water-maze."

"I am in a three-dimensional environment, though it is not a maze of my designing," said Demaro, staggering to his feet again and clasping one irritatingly unblemished hand about the tiller. "What did you say you called this?"

The sails shuddered again. Something in their bizarre automated rig whined like a soul in torment.

"It's a tiller, just hold on to it and keep it pointing where I showed you."

"And on Barrayar men customarily go sailing together as a bonding ritual? And get soaked to their skins and take turns holding this long throbbing device?" Demaro shook his head. There was still some pigment clinging to his arched and well-shaped eyebrow. "No wonder galactic women are so famously unwilling to marry you."

Piotr made a disgusted noise and turned away from him. "We have to take off some of that sail. Fob, go below and..."

Fob pressed herself willingly close to shout in his ear. She wasn't used to sailing, never having been allowed out on the water at Vormarlow Tsenàly, but she had the gift of careful footing, and of not transferring her weight too quickly in the wrong direction. Which meant she would never pitch into his arms, but at least she was less likely to be flung overboard. Between the weather, the currents, the dark, and the distinct lack of anything resembling a lifebelt, he didn't want to get involved in rescues if he could help it. "I already looked at the automated system in the cabin and I can't make head nor tail of it. _You'll_ have to do it. Tell me what to do with the sails from here."

A wave shuddered the side, and slopped foam over both their pairs of boots. Perhaps Komarran trousers weren't quite so stupid an idea after all. He _really_ wouldn't want her to fall overboard hampered by five kilos of wet skirt. Anyway, someone had to do it, and he couldn't, not with this arm; and besides, wet and cold as they all were, he would sooner she kept moving and Demaro sat still rather than the reverse. He shouted some instructions into her ear and staggered below, cradling his arm as best he could,.

The yacht tilted itself violently to port as he stumbled in. He managed to make the safe haven of a pilot's chair in front of a profoundly uninformative display, though the effort jarred his arm badly and sent ricochets of pain all the way through his shoulders and spine.

He studied the display. It wasn't in any language he understood, though the closest match was probably Vervani. _If_ the engine could be started, they could make their way towards shore. If not, he'd have to have another try at making sense of this infernally alien sail-rig - if it wasn't for the tiller, so blessedly, obviously made for a human hand, he'd have thought they'd made first contact with actual tentacular possibly silicon-based aliens and the bloody things built yachts - and try, cautiously, to tack shoreward. Then again, it might be better to wait for light. For whatever light there might be, on a planet with a half-built soletta array. Possibly the moonlight was as good as it got.

Piotr managed to locate the emergency beacon. As he'd half-expected, it had been disabled, and did nothing. Neither did any of the controls associated with the engine, though a few moments of random prodding left him with a message which he had no trouble deciphering, despite the bizarre dialect they went in for on Kierlundy, as _out of power_.

The sails, according to the information about them held on the system, were made of a particularly advanced polymer, but, with only a grudging trickle of power to their automated system, would be just as much of a chore to raise and lower as canvas. Fob flung herself down the companionway and into the cabin, grasping neatly at a handhold that Piotr had completely missed. The doors slapped shut behind her. "I just had a thought. What you want is a sling," she said without preamble.

"What do you propose to make one out of?"

"Well, if I'd been dressed like a proper Barrayaran maiden, I'd have a couple of acres of spare petticoats, but as it is..." He looked over at her. Dark head tumbled, she was looking into an unsealed plastic container. She made a dubious face at it. "There's _some_ rations - Kierlundy's favourite brand of fish protein bar, apparently - and most of a medical kit. Hold still."

Having the sling fitted hurt, in Piotr's estimation, very nearly as much as being shot by an auto-needler in the first place. Fob looked critically at her work. "Well, it's the best I can do, and as long as you don't do anything but rest that arm and captain the ship."

"Calling it a _ship_'s a bit of a stretch."

"Ship," said Fob positively. "You tell Miakh and me what to do and we'll do it."

"I don't like you calling him Miakh like that."

"Why not? It's his name."

"Because he's a damned Cetagandan ghem-fop whose sister designs sea-monsters."

Other women's eyes sparkled. Fob didn't go in for anything as champagne-like as sparkling, being an altogether fullbodied-red-wine sort of woman, but her entire face _glowed_, strongly, from within. They were already in close proximity in the tiny cabin; she leaned an arm across his lap. Over the years, she'd learned to be a bit less lavish with the scent, but something about her still smelt of orchids as well as sea-water and sweat. "Why, Piotr, are you _jealous_?"

The boat was starting to turn. He hadn't told Demaro to do any such thing, and besides, it didn't _feel_ like a change of course; it felt like the little yacht making its own blind heavy way. He could hear Demaro sliding about in the cockpit. The Cetagandan leaned heavily against the doors and peered in, bringing the cold and the smell of spray with him. "One of your sails has come loose," he informed them disdainfully.

"_What have you done with the tiller?_" The only reason Piotr didn't add a string of expletives directed at Cetagandans to the end of that remark was that he knew he'd have to husband his energy. Wincing as his arm flared at him again, he struggled back up on deck. He hadn't been afloat in too long, and he'd lost the trick of using the yacht's own rise and fall to propel himself forwards. Only possessing one functioning arm didn't help. The spray on deck was as thick as soup. Piotr gritted his teeth. The cold had got into those, as well, and the sea was pounding at the yacht's vulnerable sides like fists at a door. "What do you think you're playing at, you Cetagandan - ghem-Colonel? We need to keep heading to shore!"

"The shorelines of Kierlundy are known for their treacherous rocks," shouted Demaro, sounding so infuriatingly like Notaras that Piotr was very tempted to believe that a past Madame Notaras had attracted the attentions of a ghem-officer during the Occupation.

"_As I was going to say_, if we lose sight of our one possible shore we have approximately the chances of survival of a quaddie thespian dressed up to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and getting lost in the back streets of Vorbarr Sultana."

"What an astonishingly barbarous place Barrayar is."

"It's no more barbarous than the open sea!" No less, either, but Piotr wasn't going to argue that with a supercilious landsman who was probably just sore because he was several miles at a conservative estimate from the nearest shop that sold makeup. He sat down again - the sling helped, though it still made sharp pain scutter up his spine and out over his shoulder - and grabbed the tiller once again.

"In any case," said Demaro, "as I was explaining to Lady Dodd - " Piotr decided not to correct that, " - it is my opinion that the light may well be merely bioluminescence, designed by some predator to lure..."

"Oh, rocks or krakens, make your _mind_ up," said Piotr, totally out of patience. "Whichever it is, I say we get a bit closer and jill about until we've got a bit more light, and at least a _chance_ of seeing those rocks or dragons or whatever they are of yours. And I warn you now, it's going to mean a great deal of hard sailing just to stay in sight of the light and not be carried off towards what this planet has in the way of a south pole."

Fob was trying to feed him a fragment of fish protein bar. He wished she wouldn't. It only made him realise how hungry he was as well as how wet and how chilled. And the rations didn't just have to last until they reached shore; there was absolutely no guarantee that Kierlundy had any edible biomass whatever. Conversely, there was no guarantee that it wasn't full of predators fit to do Demaro's sister's heart good. And it was all up to him to navigate them through it. Fob was unskilled, and Demaro's skills clearly extended only to making unhelpful remarks. Besides, no red-blooded Barrayaran would hand over command to a Cetagandan even if the aforementioned Cetagandan had sailed around Sigma Ceta single-handed in the shortest time ever, by the proper route around the poles, no slipping through the Degtiar Canal. _Which was not the case_, so Piotr didn't need to grit his teeth about it, except that they didn't seem to want to come ungritted, not even to chatter.

The fate of the ship, and Fob - and ghem-Colonel Demaro, as if anyone cared about _him_ \- rested in the frail skin of Piotr Vormarlow's honour, and he wasn't sure how watertight it was. _Critically poor judgment both of men and situations. A disaster waiting to happen_. But, please God, not a disaster involving Fob.

They'd have to watch for a change in the tides. He considered whether it was possible to calculate anything, and decided it was not, and best to rest his weary brain; it'd need a genius to work out what was going on with all these moons, besides not having any idea what phase the tides were in. Demaro certainly considered himself a genius, but as far as Piotr was concerned the jury was out on that until an actual bioluminescent sea-serpent heaved over the horizon and gave them a whole new set of problems.

"Your arm's hurting you again," said Fob. "Shall I take the tiller?"

"No, let Demaro do it."

"You'd trust a Cetagandan to steer your ship?" Demaro enquired. Water slapped over onto the deck as if sheared up by an outsized hand. Fob shivered, and tried to hide it.

_His ship._ "You're stronger than she is," Piotr said curtly. "The sails are assisted."

Demaro made another of those Cetagandan microbows. "Very well."

One of the moons was setting, a blaze of light on the wrong horizon to be any use whatever. The light crept out over the sea, turning it the colour of chopped opals. Nothing was visible for miles but sea and sky. An ugly little rill was riding over the waters, with a greater stillness behind it. The wind was dropping. Piotr wasn't sure what _that_ meant, but he was sure it wasn't anything good. There was undoubtedly an even worse squall coming up behind the lull, like some dreadful ancient Vor lord and his armies riding out behind their herald. His breath caught frozenly in the back of his throat. He was reminded of the age-old contract between the mariner and the sea; _you can sail me, boy, but never think you'll understand me._

The moonset's light glided over the slick deck of the little yacht. It took in Demaro's grim, set jaw and tight shoulders; Fob poking desperately at something that was supposed to be an automated sail-release; and Peter's own hand, which seemed to be twice the size it had been that morning and was already bleeding again through the sling. A shudder of nausea washed over him. He wished he knew how long it would be until dawn.

Demaro's muscles tensed and he swore, low in his throat. Piotr took the tiller from him. It was yet another current. Grimly, he adjusted their course.

"Why would anyone _want_ to settle this rock?" Demaro enquired against the rising push of the wind.

"Good question. We'll ask them when we find them," said Piotr, trying to keep up morale. "Fob, I think I've worked out how that unholy rig works. I need you to rotate it twenty degrees to windward. Keep a hand on that tiller, Mr Demaro."

The wind rose. The deck bucked and lifted. The prow of the little yacht lifted like a horse smelling water, and they were riding the waves, tacking through the night towards the shore.

It seemed as if at least eighty hours passed before morning. For a few of them he slept, shivering, and with fitful dreams, and then was woken by Fob and Demaro having a brisk argument about whether a handle Fob had found was the pump. It was. He'd thought that telling Demaro to pump until he felt it suck would probably just engender more anti-Barrayaran remarks, so he did it himself and Fob watched, and apparently after that Fob took care of it; at the very least, _someone_ must have done, because they weren't awash.

Once Demaro did something appallingly ill-advised to the automated sail-system and they lost nearly half their canvas, torn away into the howling night; once he made Fob go and get some rest in the cabin, and she, for once, obeyed him; and once - but he wasn't sure if he dreamed it - he found Fob sitting close and warm beside him, looking out over the pounding waves.

"So you've got your own ship," she said, and it sounded like a dream-conversation, the way she began out of nowhere, though it was very like a Fob conversation after all. "I don't mean _this_, I mean the _Prince Dorca_. You were right all along, you _did_ make it in the Fleet." She shrugged. "Sixteen is a self-righteous age," she added, which was as close as she got to an apology.

He didn't feel an apology was wanted at all, at least not from _her_. He wasn't sure what he wanted to say. Admitting he was wrong felt like piling up his honour in his cupped hands and transferring it wholesale to hers. But who else could he trust not to weigh his honour and find it wanting? "Sixteen's nothing compared to twenty-five," he said grimly. "I wasn't right. _You_ were. Nearly twenty years, garrison duty and desk duty and two stints on _weather stations_, and for what? At least if I'd gone into the Observer Corps I'd have been second-rate at something I _enjoyed_."

"You're not second-rate," she said with the firmness that had always made the world so.

"I am." He found that, telling her, he didn't mind it. "If the Imperial Service had any sense it would have saved the money it wasted putting me through the Academy and given the chance to Nicola. That way she'd be using her talents in the Emperor's service and not off working as a commercial pilot for some Escobaran syndicate or other."

"Why couldn't it pay for you both?" she said practically, and her hand crept into his. It was cold and salt-burned. So was his. But, somehow, all the pain in his other hand seemed to have transmitted itself into pure, painless sensation and then transferred itself across his body to _that_ hand, tipping him off-balance like a set of overweighted scales. He looked down at their hands. His Academy class ring was cutting into his finger, and she still bit her nails.

"I'm sorry I drove you away from Barrayar," he said instead of an answer.

"_Barrayar_ drove me away from Barrayar." She looked out to what must, by any reasonable reckoning, be eastward. There was a pale, faint glow on the horizon, which he took at first for another moonrise. "I think that's the dawn. No wonder they want a soletta array."

It wasn't just the dawn. It was the coast, first a subtly different grey from the grey of the sky, misted against the dawn; and then moss-green and black in the uncertain, overcast light that seemed to be as close to daylight as Kierlundy ever got. And, thank all his ancestors and any gods who might be listening, there were other boats on the water. A fishing fleet, he thought, perhaps, making its way home. So there had to be some kind of harbour.

Piotr took a long unimpeded breath and put his arm around Fob's shoulder. She leaned into him, warm and heavy and earnest. Her nose and the side of her brow were very close beside his jaw. Her makeup had smeared.

This was what he wanted, he thought, for the first time consciously; not surprised at the newness of it, as he had been when for six dizzy weeks he had been head over ears in love with Donna Vorrutyer, but surprised at the vast _extent_ of it, of loving Fob, which seemed always to have lived submerged in the unsettled sea-waters of him, and now rose, calm and gracious as the cliffs, out of the water at dawn. If his affair with Donna had been the leggy uncertain platform of Novymir Station, this was the whole Southern Continent.

"There's another light, is it to guide us into the harbour?" she asked deeply, pointing at an uncertain flash on shore. He thought it was probably a vehicle on the roads outside the dirty cream-coloured dome, and was about to say so when Demaro made a surprised noise and the yacht juddered. Piotr hurried over to him. His arm had gone stiff and immobile and wasn't even hurting when he moved any more, so much as aching dully all the time, a roar in the back of his head like a toothache. "What was that?"

"I do not know. The sails..."

It had been the sails, that time. Next time it might be a fishing net fouling them, or, worse, rocks on which they might go aground. At least Demaro's dragon hadn't materialised. Even so, they were still further from shore than he could swim, particularly with this arm. A memory beset him; a cove, pounding waves, a gallant but chancy small ship that had brought them within sight of shore before it pulled one last spiteful trick on them. _Never again_. It was time for the captain to earn his keep. He took the tiller from Demaro. "Fob, see if you can get some kind of coms up in the cabin. Let them know we're coming. It's the bit that looks like a radio."

"I can't speak Kierlundian," she objected.

"Keep saying _Cetaganda_ and _Barrayar_ and see if that doesn't fetch them."

The shallow sea rushed by under the prow, peridot-pale and full of small flickering shapes. So there _was_ biomass, after all. Another small miracle, in a night full of them.

Captain Lord Piotr Vormarlow guided his craft towards the shore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Particular thanks are due to Coughingbear and Owl for this chapter. Any remaining errors of boatcraft are all my own.


	5. Chapter 5

The settlement where they washed up went by the unpoetic name of Cannery. The yacht, as they discovered within moments of staggering onto the jetty, had gone missing from a larger dome-complex further up the coast which went by the even more unprepossessing name of Carcass, and the local police believed they'd caught the ship-thieves red-handed. In Piotr's case they were right, more or less, if the scabby brownish-red seepage through the sling counted. The yacht was apparently called _Foxwosk_. Piotr didn't know what a foxwosk was, but judging by his experience of Kierlundy so far, he hoped he never met one.

Piotr wasn't sure he could have walked up the hill to the dome, so it was lucky that the police had come with an all-terrain buggy. Apparently the parts of Kierlundy which weren't sea mostly consisted of hills. The buggy bounced up the slope, jarring Piotr's arm. A large pair of jawbones were mounted as an arch over the path and a long, serpentine backbone belonging to something the size of a one-man shuttle stood out of the rough grass beside it, all of which made Piotr gladder than ever that they hadn't encountered any of Kierlundy's biomass in the night and made Demaro look smug.

At least local law enforcement at Cannery were humanitarian enough to give suspected boat-bandits medical care; a meal of boiled fish and some kind of nutritious mush; an automatic translator; and a change of clothing to shiver in whilst they were questioned. Piotr's arm felt distinctly better for having been treated by a medtech. He was less happy about the questioning. The police officer, a dour and heavily moustached person by the name of Macfoyle, put his hand on the recorder with a heavy sigh and turned it on again. "Let the record show that the suspect continues to claim to be Captain Lord Piotr Vormarlow, a subject of the Emperor of Barrayar - "

"That's nothing," said his fellow officer, speaking over Piotr's head as if he had no more agency in what happened to him than the fish which formed the basis of Cannery's economy. She was a cheerful-looking young woman by the name of Rockaway, who was wrapped up in a large canvas cloak against the constant draughts which seemed as omnipresent inside the dome as the winds outside. The canvas cloak was emblazoned with the word _Fishkettles!_, but whether it was the name of a clan, a sports team, or merely an imprecation, Piotr hadn't seen enough of Kierlundian society to guess. He'd hoped her smiles meant she was more sympathetic than Macfoyle, if it hadn't been obvious that her perkiness was due to the happy knowledge that she and Macfoyle had three dangerous ship-thieves in custody whereas the larger and better-funded police force up the coast at Carcass had nothing but a file on a missing boat. "The other one, the good-looking fellow, swears he's a Cetagandan."

"There _are_ some people with Ceta blood, out in the Westward Archipelago," said Macfoyle, looking dourer than ever.

Given Kierlundy's proximity to Sigma Ceta, Piotr could not but draw his own conclusions. He doubted it would prejudice their captors in favour of Demaro. "He _is_ Cetagandan. He's a ghem-colonel. If you've got a genetic sequencer..."

"What, _here_?" said Rockaway, her eyebrows astonished ginger half-moons.

"No nearer than Kierlundy City, _as_ you well know," said Macfoyle grimly. "Now, I'll tell you what I think, and you can tell me whether you're right or not. I think you're all Komarran guest-workers from the camp out past Carcass, and you thought you'd have a laugh at our expense and steal a boat. You are all _damned_ lucky you fetched up here rather than at Carcass, because we have a station administrator who's all for doing things by the book, whereas they'd probably have strung you up before your socks dried. Now, I suggest you take advantage of your good luck, and tell me your real name, and maybe the Komarran legal advisor up on Vega will care enough to want to repatriate you."

Piotr's stomach lurched in a way that couldn't be explained by boiled fish. He was prey to a sudden, squeamish insight into the psyche of whoever had ordered their kidnap. Not the sort of person who would push helpless prisoners out of an airlock or take them down to Kierlundy and drown them, no, but quite willing to set them up for a crime that the Kierlundians plainly viewed in much the same light as Barrayarans regarded horse-theft... He tapped the automatic translator, which gave an indignant beep. "I'm speaking Russian with a Barrayaran accent. If I switch to speaking Greek, I speak _that_ with a Barrayaran accent. I can't speak - " he edited out _your demented dialect_ "- any of your language at all apart from _fishkettles_, and that's only because I read it off the back of that young lady's cloak. Doesn't that suggest to you that I might be telling the truth?"

Macfoyle scowled. "A lot of Komarrans can speak Barrayaran. Same way lots of the folk in the Westward Archipelago know 'no' and 'please' and 'don't set fire to my farm' in Ceta."

Piotr huffed. "The Emperor's decision was valid and timely..."

"_That_ sounds like he's from Barrayar," said Rockaway detachedly. "Shall I get on the com to Carcass and see if they're in the database? Or whether there's footage of them stealing the boat?"

"It'd be just like Carcass to have footage and be sitting on it," said Macfoyle, with feeling, which caused Piotr to have a sudden dizzy vision of Carcass as being entirely peopled with contortionists. "Now, as to your theft of property _from_ the yacht _Foxwosk_, which you knew - did you not? - to be the property of Mr. Karl Magnus Findlay of Unit Seventeen, Dome Four, Carcass Settlement..."

"We took _food and medical supplies!_"

Macfoyle looked dourly pleased with himself. "So you admit it."

The interrogation went on and on, until Piotr was quite seriously wondering whether he would sooner face another meal of boiled fish and vitamin-enhanced mush or be hanged without one. The door clanged open, bringing with it an unexpectedly warm blast of air which smelt of fish. Rockaway stood dramatically posed in the doorway, eyes so wide and a mouth so flopped-open that she looked rather fishlike herself. "There's a Barrayaran called Notaras _and_ a ghem-Major Hadath _and_ a woman called Winspear who says she's Station Commander Harrap's 2ic on the com talking to Administrator Lindfors in her office, and she says she wants to see all the ship-thie... the prisoners, Mr Macfoyle, sir!"

_Notaras_. Piotr felt a vast, filmy relief spreading out inside him, like the sunrise across a sea considerably calmer than any waters existing on Kierlundy. He would never have believed he'd feel so glad to hear from his second officer. "I need to speak to Notaras."

"Well, it seems he wants to speak to you, too," Macfoyle allowed, blowing out his moustache in a way that reminded Piotr of the late and much-missed Armsman Turanta. "You can understand my scepticism, though - sir." The _sir_ was grudging, but there nonetheless. "It's hard to believe a pack of outworlders could have brought that yacht safe to shore, even if it _was_ a clear still night."

"Clearest stillest night in weeks," confirmed Rockaway with a happy grin. Piotr gave her a jaundiced look. And galactics had the audacity to say that everyone on _Barrayar_ was mad.

He was glad to be reunited with Fob in the administrator of Cannery's office. Fob was wearing one of those canvas wraps over a high-necked ruffly white blouse and a heavy tweed skirt, and looked bright-cheeked and glad to see him, and as if boiled fish agreed with her digestion, which was more than it did for Piotr. The administrator was a muscular grey-haired woman in black. Demaro stood off to one side, suavely smiling, with at least a stylised approximation of the Emperor of Cetaganda's black-red-and-white livery striped across one cheek.

The administrator nodded to them and introduced herself as Lindfors. "You must have had a bracing night," she said with that Kierlundian understatement. "I'm instructed to pass on Acting Commander Winspear's apologies on behalf of everyone on Vega Station. The search is still apparently ongoing up on the habitat - " she gestured out of the window at a low stationary glow in the milky near-dark - "but she hopes to have all the conspirators apprehended in time for your return, as well as the creator of the holobooks."

"You had a clue in a holobook as well?" said Piotr, staring indignantly at Demaro.

"Indeed, yes. Having made a small study of wormhole physics during my senior year of officer training, I realised at once that it was factitious. I was very much more interested in _why_ anyone should wish to set our two Empires at each others' teeth _within their own system_. History is not short of attempts to cause such friction, but most people prefer not to make of themselves a battlefield."

"You'd be surprised," said Fob, looking at Piotr fondly. He felt his shoulders go back and his chin jut out. _Ha_, there she was taking pride in him, admittedly for a foible rather than anything worth taking pride in, but it was a start.

The administrator pursed her lips. "From what Acting Commander Winspear said to me, I do not believe Commander Harrap and her men had any thought that matters might escalate _that_ far. They merely wished for a clash between the crews of the _Prince Dorca_ and the _Superior Flame of Eta Ceta_ \- which, due to the present situation between the two empires, your respective superiors would be only too eager to blame on you and on Lieutenant Vormarlow, and to, ah, sweep under the carpet. And to pay extensive reparations." She blinked at something which had just come up in the screen on her desk. "_Very_ extensive reparations."

Piotr felt sick, thinking of how easily it could have worked, particularly given his record. Demaro did not appear to be suffering any qualms of the sort. "They did this to extort _money_?" he demanded, looking scandalised.

"It's why they do everything else," said Fob. "I told you, everything in the place needed replacing twenty years ago, and the administration's in debt up to the eyeballs. If I was Kierlundy or Longshot, I wouldn't dream of tying my economy to theirs. But if their accounts were suddenly puffed out with a no-questions-asked squirt of a few millions from Cetaganda and Barrayar..."

"I assure you that Acting Commander Winspear will be held to far higher standards of accounting than her predecessor," put in Administrator Lindfors. "I shall do my very best at the next meeting of the Kierlundy Representative Assembly to urge that it is so."

Piotr, looking at her, thought that he would put his money on it, and never mind the views of the rest of the Representative Assembly.

After that, events moved quickly. They were transferred to Carcass, which had something resembling a shuttleport, by a chugging ferry which hugged the black-cliffed coast. Demaro fell asleep. Fob leaned over the rail and breathed in the sea air.

Piotr felt strangely shy of approaching her. She looked round at him. A familiar frown crossed her square brow. Moving as neatly as if her entire life had been spent managing tweed skirts on the decks of boats, she came to stand beside him, one hand steadying herself on a bank of leather seats.

"I've done my share of waiting for you," she said. "But I think it wouldn't be so bad if the waiting was mutual."

For once, he knew exactly what to do; exactly what the gallant sailor was _supposed_ to do, with the wind in his face and a woman far too good for him looking into his eyes. He caught her round the waist with his good arm, and he kissed her.

\--

"The situation was certainly what I would characterise as _touch and go_ for a few hours there," admitted the fussy little station functionary who had been sent to meet them and convey them back to Vega Station by shuttle. "The Komarran population were threatening to riot, and I understand that it was only with difficulty that the crew of the _Prince Dorca_ were persuaded to wait for Lieutenant... ah, Vornorth?"

"Vorroux."

The functionary wiped his rheumy eyes. He looked as if he had been awake for even longer than they had. "... for Lieutenant Vorroux to settle matters. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Vorroux decided on a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of the Station Code..."

Piotr recognised _decided on a rather idiosyncratic interpretation_ as bureacratese for _made a bloody fool of himself_. "What did he do?" he asked resignedly.

Kierlundy shrank away to a green-blue marble on the shuttle's display screens. Piotr was not particularly sad to see it go. The functionary dabbed at his eyes again. "He chose to argue that since Vega Station had failed to fulfil their contract with Ms Dodd, in which they promised to maintain the bar's air filtration systems to a safe and hygienic standard - "

"I dare say they didn't, but how did Vorroux know that?"

The functionary winced. "He saw the air ducts through which they dragged you out. I can only, once again, offer my apologies on behalf of Acting Commander Winspear. As I was saying, Lieutenant Vorroux argued that due to their culpable negligence, the bar had reverted to your ownership, ma'am, and, you being an unemancipated female dependent of Count Gennady Vormarlow and Count Vormarlow being a vassal of Emperor Gregor - "

Piotr covered his eyes. He could see where this was going. "He accused them of _invading Barrayar_?"

The functionary bowed. "Indeed, sir. His - ah, opposite number, ghem-Major Hadath, then presented a counter-claim charging Count Vormarlow _in absentia_ with illegally kidnapping, detaining and transshipping a member of the ghem-caste, and he suggested that Harrap sue you and Miss Dodd both. Over - ah - failure to complete customs procedures."

Ghem-Major Hadath was a twisted genius. Piotr wondered what the Fleet's views were on trying to hire legal consultants away from the Cetagandans. "And what happened next?"

"It was Second Officer Notaras who provided the solution. He had come to the conclusion that the equations were false, and supposing that you must have come to the same conclusion and caused the conspirators to panic - which was in essence true, though it was ghem-Colonel Demaro who had made the discovery - he took it upon himself to wake Lord Ivan..."

"Where _was_ Lord Ivan?"

"Apparently he discovered an old acquaintance among the passengers aboard the _Superior Flame of Eta Ceta_ and - ah, I'm not clear on his motivations - decided on that basis to remain in his quarters for the evening and to refuse to answer his com. A Lord Selden, I think he said. Apparently Lord Ivan had been acquainted with his wife when visiting Eta Ceta."

It meant nothing to Piotr. "So then what did _Ivan_ do to make things worse?"

The functionary looked shocked, and then disapproving. "In fact it was Lord Ivan who defused the, ah, tense situation."

"How did he manage that?" demanded Fob in a fascinated tone of voice.

The functionary looked more disapproving still. "He took them all out drinking. Apparently Harrap confessed the entire plan to him when he pretended to be too stupid to understand what she was explaining to him, and Mr Notaras managed to record the entire conversation on his wrist-com."

Ivan was a genius too, albeit a sideways-on one. Piotr leaned back against his padded ship-seat and rolled his shoulders back. "When I next get the chance," he said generously, "I'm going to introduce Lord Ivan to all my unmarried sisters. Especially Lavrenti. I think he might like Lavrenti."

The functionary removed himself as soon as they were permitted to unbuckle their seat-restraints, and took himself off to a seat beside Demaro, where they could be heard primly discussing the _Superior Flame of Eta Ceta_'s docking fees.

Piotr was left alone with Fob, and a future that had suddenly turned as complicated as Kierlundy's tides. "So what do we do now?" he ventured. "I can't just go back to Barrayar and leave you here."

"Of course you can just go back to Barrayar and leave me here. It would be stupid in the extreme to desert when you're coming to the end of your twenty-year hitch, and I can't see Winspear or whoever's left in charge wanting you to stay on as Barrayaran liaison officer."

"You sound just like Irina."

"That's enough of that. You've spent far too long thinking of me as a relative." She kicked off one of her outsized, borrowed shoes and wiggled her toes.

"So - you mean I go back to Barrayar and you stay here on Vega Station and we never see each other again?" he asked, desolately.

"I don't mean that at all. I _told_ you. I'll wait for you, as long as the waiting's mutual. You can even put the announcement in the Vorbarr Sultana papers, though if it means I get a lot of completely unsuitable engagement presents shipped over here in cargo pods from Barrayar I shall display them on the walls of the bar, and so I warn you."

There was still an emptiness inside him, delirious, like free fall. "Fob, are you proposing to me?"

"Of course I am. I'd have proposed to you when I was sixteen if you'd given me time to speak."

If they'd married then, at sixteen and twenty-five... he cringed at the number of ways it would undoubtedly have gone wrong. It certainly wouldn't have led to them sitting here, smiling at each other, at forty and thirty-one. He suspected she knew it as well as he did; but, being Fob, would never admit it. He ventured a tease. "Are you planning to wear Komarran trousers at the wedding?"

"Well, apart from when Irina's inspecting me to see whether I'm a mutant," she said with a lazy smile. "As if she hadn't given me baths and taken me swimming when I was five. Actually, I expect we'll skip it altogether and go and listen at the door whilst Carl's inspecting _you_."

He hoped he didn't look as taken-aback as he felt. "We don't have to stick to _all_ the old customs."

"Good," said Fob deeply, that deep, cat-purr rumble of happiness back in her voice, and took possession of his good hand. "Komarran trousers it is. But I'll have them made up in the House colours, if it'll make you happy."

\--

There were quite a crowd to welcome them once they cleared Docks and Locks, including a short, burly painted-faced figure who Piotr guessed must be the ingenious ghem-Major Hadath, and a beaming and congratulatory if hung-over Ivan Vorpatril, who stole a kiss from Fob on the grounds that the Vorpatrils were related to Countess Vormarlow several centuries back on his mother's side and that made him practically family. Vorroux was nowhere to be seen. A grey-haired Komarran woman in a practical-looking trouser suit approached Fob, and soon they were deep in conversation.

Notaras and Piotr exchanged salutes. "My congratulations on your safe return, sir," said Notaras dryly.

Piotr returned rather more deserved congratulations in return. Notaras gave a grave small bow of his polished head. "I shall, of course, be making a report to my superiors," he said.

"Your _other_ superiors, eh?" said Piotr, baring his teeth. "You go on and do that, Notaras."

"He said _what_?" Fob boomed. Any other woman would have squawked, but out of Fob, it was definitely a boom. She loomed over the grey-haired woman like some kind of thoroughly disconcerted goddess. "I am _so sorry_, Chief Sandys, and I will make sure you get an official apology."

Fob was blushing. Piotr hadn't seen _that_ happen in a good long while. He disengaged from Notaras and strolled over, hands clasped behind his back. To his _fiancée_, ha, yes. "What's the problem."

"Lieutenant Vorroux," Fob informed him, "is an idiot."

"I'm surprised you didn't work _that_ out as soon as you heard about the bagpipes."

"What bagpipes?" asked Chief Sandys. "I don't mind, really, I was just amused by the way he phrased it."

"I mind for you!" Fob looked cross and disarranged. Piotr wondered interestedly whether this was a usual symptom of being a fiancée. "Piotr, your Lieutenant Vorroux called Chief Sandys - _who has forty years of experience supervising soletta arrays, and a first-class degree from Solstice Technical University_ \- well, he called her 'the closest thing he could find to a Baba' and instructed her to bring me his _proposal_! Apparently his father's Lord Vorroux, his grandfather's Count Vorroux, he rents a house under the Old Walls in Vorbarr Sultana when the Council of Counts is in session, and he expects me to move in with his mother. _Barrayarans_!"

"You sound like Countess Vorkosigan," said Chief Sandys, handsomely amused, hands in pockets. "I met her once. She asked some very sensible questions about soletta array maintenance."

Fob looked profoundly uninterested in Countess Vorkosigan or anyone else. Piotr addressed himself to Chief Sandys. "Well, if you'd be so kind as to continue acting as Baba - and you'll have my thanks if you will - I'd be obliged if you'd inform Lieutenant Vorroux that he's behind the fair. Miss Dodd has already agreed to become Lady Piotr Vormarlow."

"_Dr Dodd-Vormarlow_" corrected Fob deeply.

Piotr turned to his fiancée. "You didn't tell me you had a doctorate."

She tucked her hand into his arm, and smiled; a warm, sybaritic, entirely contented Fob-smile. "You didn't ask. But you can ask now. You've got all the rest of the _Prince Dorca_'s stopover to ask me things."

And so he did.


End file.
